Just a few random thoughts from Ryan Lizza’s TNR article last year. I found this article fascinating. She has quite an organization, one seems almost impervious to the dangers of attacks by the left or the right. They appear to have planned for all eventualities.
I have so many mixed feelings about her. On the one hand I realize we had 8 good years with them in the White House, but on the other I have learned so much since that gives me pause.
Hillaryland…that is really the name.
Hillaryland…Guide to the Clinton Juggernaut
Not going to post stuff in order, but in order of fascination to me. First off, Mark Penn, her pollster. I don’t like him at all. He and his company have meddled too much in polling in other countries. Now I would never imply they might meddle here…
Well, I found out that Dick Morris brought him into the tightly knit group…amazing, huh?
When Howard Wolfson, Harold Ickes, Mandy Grunwald, and Mark Penn were thrown together six years ago, there was no reason to predict they would produce a twelve-point victory for Hillary in New York. Wolfson, the communications czar, had no previous experience in Hillaryland, but, as a local, he was liked–or at least feared–by the New York press. Ickes, the expert on New York state politics, had been unceremoniously dumped by Bill Clinton at the moment he thought he was going to be promoted to chief of staff (he read about it in the newspaper). Grunwald, the ad-maker and a 1992 campaign alum–that’s her voice yelling out of the speakerphone at James Carville in The War Room–was kicked out in 1995 to make room for the new team, which included none other than pollster Mark Penn. Penn, in turn, was brought in by Dick Morris, a man that Ickes has hated–“He’s a sleazy son of a bitch,” he has said–for about 25 years, ever since they tangled in the politics of the Upper West Side.
Some more about Penn, whom I just don’t like.
Ever since then, Penn has been the messaging mastermind of Hillaryland. His stubborn centrism, arrived at by sifting through tons of granular-level psychographic polling–that is, psychological and demographic–has long angered liberals, and it is likely be the greatest source of future tension in Hillaryland. “We kind of know what Mark is going to say in every situation,” says one top adviser to his left. But there is little doubt that Hillary is a true devotee of Penn–who is also a Tony Blair adviser and partisan of the transatlantic Third Way project–and his middle-of-the-road style of politics.
And back to the beginning of the fairly long article for some background the power of the group.
Today, Hillaryland is a vast political empire based in Washington and New York that, in its scale and ambition, is unrivaled in Democratic politics. But the spirit of Hillaryland, as well as many of its leaders, remains the same. Alan Patricof, Hillary’s Senate campaign finance chair, who has been raising money for the Clintons for two decades, says, “She’s got a very loyal group of people around her who have supported her for a long time.” In fact, everyone in Hillaryland says that. They prefer to compare Hillary’s operational style to George W. Bush’s rather than Bill’s. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, premise is that, unlike her husband’s White House team–not to mention the last two Democratic presidential campaigns–there are no mercenaries in Hillaryland, only true believers, a culture they say is hardening now that many Democratic sharks are circling Hillaryland, looking for a way in.
And now to the Ins and the Outs of Hillaryland.
In Hillaryland, you’re either in or you’re out. Bill Clinton famously agonized over pushing aides from his inner circle. He cried and apologized the day his fired press secretary Dee Dee Myers left the White House. After the 1994 elections, he dawdled and couldn’t bring himself to get rid of several advisers who were left wondering about their status, even as he began to rely on their replacements. In contrast, Hillary’s team likes bright lines, and one way they maintain them is by firmly establishing an in-crowd. Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary and face of the Clinton administration for two and a half years? Out. (They suspect he’s a John Edwards man, though an Edwards aide says he isn’t.) James Carville? In. (He’s personally close to Hillary and speaks to her regularly.) Doug Sosnik, one of Bill Clinton’s senior strategists in the late ’90s? Out. (He’s advising former Virginia Governor Mark Warner.) John Podesta, Clinton’s last chief of staff and now the president of the Center for American Progress? Way in. (He has important links to labor and environmental groups and serves as a policy conduit to Hillary.) Leon Panetta, Clinton’s second chief of staff? Far out. (He clashed with Hillary and tried to keep Hillaryland at arm’s length from the West Wing.) But trying to determine who’s in and out is nothing compared with figuring out who’s influential and who’s not. That search takes you deep into Hillaryland.
I would love to know which “In person” told Hillary to suggest that if we disapproved of the way she spoke of her Iraq War vote, there were others to vote for. I am considering taking her up on that, at least in the primaries.
